uk politics

I’ve noticed that there’s a rising star shining within the Conservative Party, and to my surprise it’s Jacob Rees-Mogg, the whimsically anachronistic MP from North East Somerset. Recently he’s been gaining in popularity thanks to a grassroots online campaign called #Moggmentum, which seems to be an emerging right-wing equivalent of the kind of grassroots support that swept Jeremy Corbyn into power as leader of the opposition.

Where is his support coming from? Primarily from the Internet of course. He’s been a viral sensation among the right for about five years, attaining viral status through his use of the word “floccinaucinihilipilification”. Since then he’s won himself a loyal following through his gentlemanly attitude and his dry English wit. He also made his name as a supporter of the Leave campaign in last year’s referendum, and now you will find plenty of Rees-Mogg moments on YouTube, which individual views for each video typically reaching the tens of thousands. If that’s not enough, in the wake of Theresa May’s weakness, there’s an unofficial campaign to get Jacob Rees-Mogg to become leader of the Conservative Party, and thus become Prime Minister.

The momentum appears to be having results. It used to be that Boris Johnson or David Davis would be the most likely person to succeed Theresa May if she were to resign, or if a leadership contest were held soon. Recently, however, he is becoming the new favourite to potentially succeed Theresa May. The betting odds for him becoming leader have also gotten better. On PaddyPower he currently has a 10/1 chance of becoming leader (putting him in 4th place, behind Boris Johnson and Phillip Hammond), and according to Oddschecker, the outlook is similar across the board.

So, what do I think of him? I kind of like him. He composes himself very well in debates, he always speaks politely, and he has mostly sensible positions on the important issues, coming from a conservative background of course. He’s a breath of fresh air compared to most politicians in this country. A sane alternative to Chairman May, the Corbynistas (along with their meaner and uglier politics), and the establishment Tories (indeed, Rees-Mogg seems to have more in common with UKIP than the Tories). Compared to Theresa May, I think he would be a superior leader. He the “strong and stable” conservative that May acted like she was throughout her whole campaign, but unlike May, he can hold his own in a debate, and he’s willing to debate on national TV.

As for his political views, he seems to be a bit more conservative than the establishment conservatives. I firmly agree with him on Brexit, and I agree with his support of the DUP deal (which was ultimately based on pragmatism). He has also said that, on the issue of climate change, he would prefer solutions that don’t hinder technological progress, and the way see it, that could mean he’s open to letting the free market solve it. The main thing I disagree with him on is his opposition to the legalisation of gay marriage. He voted against the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act of 2013, and his main reasoning is simply because he was a Catholic, and he felt it was a matter of “what is sacrament”. It’s a stupid argument against gay marriage, but I’m willing to let his stance of gay marriage slide for two reasons. Firstly, gay marriage is an irrelevant topic because the argument is over. Gay marriage is legal in Britain and nobody has any real argument against it. Secondly, the way I see it, if Rees-Mogg does become leader of the Tories, he may eventually have to moderate his own public position on the matter.

I’m also concerned with the idea of another old-fashioned Etonian running the Tory party, which has been dogged by a nasty reputation as a party of Etonians for a long time, and David Cameron’s tenure only exacerbated this. However, I think Rees-Mogg will get by the same way he became a viral sensation, through the way he composes himself in debates and on public appearances. It also helps that he’s actually attracting potential voters. He may very well be the kryptonite to Jeremy Corbyn’s chances of victory in the next election, possibly because he talks to people instead of talking down to them. An actually right-wing leader of the party, which Rees-Mogg would be, would present an actual alternative to Corbynite socialism, one that the voters could believe in.

Of course, this is all presumption. In politics things have a nasty habit of changing when you least expect it. But I think it’s possible, and at any rate I would be in favour of Jacob Rees-Mogg leading the Tory party, not least because his growing popularity is spooking the left. Sites like The Canary and The New Statesman are apparently struggling to comprehend Rees-Mogg’s popularity, and are quick to demonise #Moggmentum as a “cult of personality”. And I suppose Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t have a cult of personality. Corbyn has the biggest cult of personality in British politics. Nobody on the left dares question the messianic cult of personality surrounding Corbyn, but if somebody on the right has that kind of support, somehow that disturbs them. That tells me that Rees-Mogg is the perfect candidate to lead the Tory party. Not only does he actually believe in Brexit, but he also has far more personality than the Maybot could ever offer, and his popularity upsets the right amount of people. I don’t think it’s likely he’ll lead the party, but I hope this #Moggmentum lasts longer than just a few months.

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On the night of the election, I took to Facebook to express my desire for civility. At that time, I thought the Tories were destined for an increased majority, and worried that we would yet again see the British left acting like a cornered animal, and proclaim that the voters have ruined the country by re-electing the Tories. Believing my Facebook feed would be flooded with anti-Tory diatribes from people who militantly can’t accept the outcome of the election, I wrote a long post wherein I called for people to accept the outcome the election, and to not alienate their friends because of their political differences.

Predictably, I didn’t alienate anyone, because I didn’t reveal my voting intentions. However, I wound up drawing the ire of an acquaintance who turned out to be some kind of far-left, pessimistic Labour supporter who believes that we should be angry at people who vote the “wrong” way, but honestly believes that the Tories will take democracy away. Oh, but a MarxistLabour leader won’t? She doesn’t even cite any evidence for this to be the case, which quickly descended into the false equivalency between Trump and Hitler, which has been debunked countless times already. The whole case basically amounted to someone who has such little faith in humanity that her solution to the proposed problem is to take away that right to choose to vote left or right.

The fact that her position was untenable was not the problem. The problem is that she un-added me from Facebook immediately after posting, not even waiting for me to counter that argument, and there you have the crux of what I was talking about in that post – people dismissing others for not having the same political opinions as you. I wasn’t even endorsing anyone, and even though I ended up voting UKIP, I didn’t suggest that people should have voted for them. It seems to me that we live in such polarised times that even posting something neutral gets you some flack.

Even though I aimed my post at Labour voters (who I thought would be the ones crying all over Facebook), I calling for people of all sides to accept the outcome of the election no matter what, and be completely civil about their disagreements. Evidently that virtue is long dead in today’s world, where people can choose to sequester themselves into ideological ghettos. It’s this sort of problem that makes it hard for people to have any sort of political discussion. Nobody really had a problem with my statement. In fact, the only people who might have had a problem with the sentiment I expressed were the far-left. They can’t handle civility, because they can’t really push their agenda in a society where everyone gets along. They depend on people being fragmented into political tribes so they can put their agenda forward, and it saddens me to see how many people (particularly the young) eat it up every single time.

Moving on from that, people aren’t so much hostile about the Tories winning the election so much as the idea that the Tories will form a pact with the DUP. They’re convinced that the DUP are a bunch of far-right Christian fundamentalists who want to turn back the clock on gay rights and abortion, but when I ask what they plan to do in government that’s anti-gay, nobody can answer me, at least not by heart. In Northern Ireland they block gay marriage using something called “the petition of concern”, but I have no reason to believe they’ll attempt this in mainland Britain. The DUP are no threat to civil liberties. For one, they only have ten seats in Parliament, all of them in Northern Ireland. Second, they’ve made crystal clear that they’ll only bolster the Tories on key issues, such as the economy and security.

Third, this is the only workable option the Tories have. What coalition would you prefer? A Tory-SNP coalition? The only thing it’ll do is weaken the government’s stance on Brexit. Would you prefer another Con-Dem coalition? Well you can forget about that because Tim Farron himself ruled out. Or maybe you prefer a rainbow coalition with Labour and any willing left-wing parties. Mathematically that would be impossible. For it to work requires either Labour having won 20 more seats, or the SNP keeping at least 50. Neither outcome happened, and if they tried it now, they wouldn’t be able to make up a majority. It would still be a minority government, and an illegitimate one considering that Labour were the losers in the election. So when Theresa May says that her pact with DUP is the only workable option, she’s correct. I don’t like it, but I have to take it. It’s called having a stiff upper lip. I thought we Brits were good at that.

Besides, in retrospect this is the best result we could hope for. Having the lost the majority, Theresa May has lost the ability to carry out the worst policies in her manifesto, which, to me at least, means that her plans to censor the internet, which were already unworkable to begin with, may yet be blocked in Parliament, all because the young people voted for Labour in droves because the Tories were coming after their porn. As for Labour, we may now have a strong left-wing opposition to the Tories, and that means the dreaded age of austerity may finally come to an end as Labour will undoubtedly oppose any new austerity measures the Tories try to put through. It also means that fox hunting is as good as dead, and the old people won’t have to suffer Theresa’s unbelievably vampiric social care plans.

Beyond that, the result proves that, even though we’ve come back to two-party politics, people are getting tired of the old establishment politics. The Tories will have to do much better than they have in order to defeat Jeremy Corbyn the next time (even though I think at this point a Labour government in 2022 might be inevitable). It also proves that Brexit isn’t the only thing on people’s mind, that the electorate aren’t a bunch of single-issue voters who the left and the right can simply appease with worthless platitudinal slogans. In a way, it also proves that democracy is alive and well, with the Tories now in a position where they actually have to face opposition.

This will be the last election-related post I make, being as I’m getting exhausted from election politics, and I’d like to write about some topics that I’ve not been able to for a while.

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For better or worse, Theresa May managed to survive the calamitous failure of her 2017 election campaign, which led to her leading a minority government propped up by the DUP. I have to give her credit for at least managing to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of power, but she should enjoy her marginal success while it lasts. After this failure of an election campaign, her career may as well be over. After this campaign, she has weakened her hand significantly, and in a minority government, she has lost all authority and credibility that she barely had before then.

How is she doomed? Well for starters, she basically killed her own campaign. She set out to commit blue murder on the opposition, but she ended up shooting herself in the foot instead. All the more damning was that she practically convinced her fellow Tories that she had it in the bag. They were hoping that she would lead them back into a large majority, giving them the mandate they need to do whatever they wanted. Now that she failed, I imagine that there are now a number of Tory MP’s looking for her head on a silver platter.

There’s already talk of a possible leadership contest in the near future. It’s mainly speculation, but it’s not entirely groundless. Now that Theresa May appears to have been weakened, it’s likely that other Tory MPs may try to undermine her, and if the time is right, they might launch a leadership coup against her, just like Labour’s MP’s tried to with Jeremy Corbyn just last year. It’s not an incredibly likely scenario, but it’s not impossible.

The way I see it, even if Theresa May survives the rest of the year in Downing Street, she’ll basically spend what I assume will be her final term lurching from one crisis to another until she is eventually either taken down, or loses the election to Labour, which I believe they will because from here on out the people will see the Tories as emperors with no clothes. The legitimacy of the Tories has been undermined so badly that the stench of failure will haunt the next government.

And then there’s the European question. In this election, the Tories have drawn blood, and like the sharks that they are, the EU leaders will likely smell that weakness, and attempt to exploit that. If Theresa May were somehow able to hardball the EU despite her weakened position, it could perhaps restore people’s faith in her, and that might translate into better electoral performance. However, there will be Tory MP’s who don’t like her approach to Brexit, some of them may have been re-elected.

Of course, even with her successes, she will be remembered for this year’s seismic election, and by extension, her failure to campaign, which has exposed her failure as a campaigner, but also her arrogance. She honestly believed that the election was her’s to win, and that the people would accept that either vote for her and give her a strong majority or we’d have a coalition of chaos. Well as the old saying goes, pride goes before destruction, and in the end, the arrogance of a politician or a party will inevitably be punished by the electorate. In fact, the Tories did so badly that it makes Diane Abbott look more competent by comparison (incidentally, she was re-elected by her constituents in a landslide).

For me, there is really no other way of looking at Theresa May’s career other than through such a pessimistic lens, because that’s the truth. She’s over. She’s overplayed her hand, she’s weakened her own party, and she may well have crippled Brexit, while handing power to her opposition. At this rate, she’s doomed. If she manages to stay in power for the rest of the 2010’s, that in itself will be an accomplishment, but she will perhaps be remembered as one of the worst Prime Ministers in history, single-handedly alienating everyone that she could. As for Brexit, this is perhaps the best result that the slimy pro-European Tories could hope for, and they will have the opportunity to do to her what they did to Margaret Thatcher in 1990.

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When I saw the exit polls predicting a hung parliament, I was quite worried, but I still clung to some kind of hope that, maybe people were lying to the polls again. When I got up in the morning, I awoke to realise that the exit polls were right. The Tories failed to win an outright majority, and thus, with only 313 seats as I’m writing this, we have entered a hung parliament. The future of my country is uncertain, and the blame for all of this lies with Theresa May. She called this election with the sole intent of strengthening her majority, and in the end she ended up weakening her’s and potentially putting Brexit at risk. As I’m writing this, the Tories are now attempting to form a coalition government with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (who have 10 seats), and if the Tories manage to win enough seats, this could be possible.

Of course we know why this has happened. Theresa May could have had the sweeping majority she wanted. All she had to do was not screw it up. She could have just focused on Brexit and controlling immigration, and she could have gone about making the public case for a hard Brexit scenario. Instead, she didn’t bother going on TV debates with the opposition, making her look weak. She used her overconfident position to put forward widely unpopular policies, such as fox hunting, and regulation of the Internet. She believed that the Brexit-voting public would simply default to her in order to secure Brexit, but the electorate saw right through it, and thus we have our current situation.

Labour, meanwhile, benefitted not just from a significant share of the UKIP vote, but also from a surge of young voters flocking to Labour. This election has been very good for the Marxists in the Labour Party, and I think this is primarily because the Tories wanted to police the Internet. They could have secured the young vote if they at least kept that part secret until they got elected. I also have to concede that Jeremy Corbyn ran a more positive campaign than Theresa May did. Corbyn, for all his faults, at least tried to appeal to voters, and was able to inspire a genuine following. All Theresa May had was a bunch of empty slogans. Her entire campaign was based on assuming that she had this in the bag, and the only way she could inspire people to vote was through the same old scare tactics. Whether or not she’s right about Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t change the fact that people are bored with the old politics of fear.

I can’t help but think that Theresa May deliberately screwed this up. If she wanted to, she could have carried this election. There’s no way she should have done this badly, so I think it’s possible that she deliberately set her campaign up to either fail to get the vote, or enter a wobbly hung parliament, so that she could abdicate her obligation to fulfil the will of the people. After all, she did campaign on the Remain side of the referendum. If there’s a chance that she might have a way out of actually delivering Brexit, I think she would take it. Then again, it could just be pure incompetence, which is unsurprising given her performance as Home Secretary.

Whatever the outcome after the election, two things are certain. First, Theresa May will not resign. She still has the most seats in Parliament, so she could try to either assemble a coalition, or continue on in a minority government, though I think that whatever she does, there will now be Tory MP’s who will turn against her, and try to undermine her in government, with the goal of possibly removing her from the Tory leadership.

Secondly, with UKIP obliterated, the SNP in decline, the Greens remaining stagnant and the Lib Dems only enjoying marginal growth, today’s election results signal a return to two-party politics. Every party has seen a decline in their share of votes except for Labour and the Conservatives. We haven’t seen a result like this since October 1974, when Labour’s Harold Wilson returned to power in a minority government. It doesn’t look likely that Jeremy Corbyn will resign, given that this is the best possible result Labour could hope for. Whenever the next election is held, the path is clear. We will be faced with the terrible decision of either electing a band of Marxist ideologues under Labour, or electing a clearly incompetent Conservative party that can’t even win a significant majority anymore. Either way, politics as usual will never be the same again.

Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters love to think that he’s out to bring real change for Britain, for the betterment of the working class. These people are obviously unfamiliar with British political history, as Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-left socialism, or at least aspects of it, have been tried before. We tried big government socialism after World War II, and we called it the “post-war consensus”. The idea was that all British governments after the war agreed on the idea that they were responsible for maintaining the welfare state through state intervention in the economy.

Between 1945 and 1979, post-war governments implemented a regime of high taxes, high spending, and an all-encompassing program of nationalisation, in which everything you can imagine was brought into government ownership. Both Labour and the Conservatives made the same contributions to the creation of the post-war socialist dream, in which the state was supposed to manage everything, and everyone would live in state housing, drive state cars, and work in state industries, and your children would be educated by the state. The state, in theory, would also look after its loyal subjects. That was the idea behind the NHS, one of the last decaying relics of the post-war consensus still around to this day.

The post-war consensus literally was socialism in practice. The problem, of course, was that they never changed direction even as the economic situation deteriorated. During the 1970’s economic growth had become so lethargic that the government’s tax and spend policies had become unsustainable. Adding to the problems facing Britain in the 1970’s was Corbyn’s beloved trade unions constantly agitating the government whenever it introduced policies that threatened their economic bottom line.

In the early 70’s, when Edward Heath was in power, Britain was suffering from high inflation (put simply, everything became more expensive because our currency lost value), and the government attempted to solve this by imposing a public sector pay cap. However the miner’s unions objected, and thus persuaded miners to do no more than the basic requirement of their jobs, causing fuel supplies to drop. The government responded by imposing a 3-day work week for anyone who used electricity, who were only allowed to use electricity for three consecutive days. So yes, if you’re wondering how there was a point in time where you had days without electricity, it was unions’ fault. Keep in mind that much of Corbyn’s manifesto consists of demands from unions, who were instrumental in getting him elected as leader of the Labour Party.

Later on, Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan introduced a policy called “The Social Contract”, in which government ministers and union leaders would meet and discuss policy with each other, and eventually decide on the best course of action. Of course, this gave union leaders more power and influence, and they now felt that they practically ran the country, and set about enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.

After the Labour government decided to cut government spending, which was necessary as by the mid-1970’s even the left-wing Callaghan himself admitted that they could no longer spend money they didn’t have, the Transport and General Worker’s Union abandoned the social contract, and after the government tried to limit pay increases to 5%, Ford workers from the TGWU went on strike. Ford capitulated, and eventually gave them a 17% pay increase. After that, the unions quickly realised that they could easily make money by calling random strikes for “better pay”, which caused the Winter of Discontent. As a result, we had trash piling up on the streets during the coldest winter in 16 years.

Because of the Labour government’s incompetence, the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher easily won the 1979 election, and once swept into power, Thatcher quickly went to work bringing about the end of the post-war consensus. This meant rolling back the welfare state, privatising failing industries that were previously nationalised, and weakening the power of trade unions, and it worked. Within the next decade the economy bounced back from the brink, and because Thatcher’s ideas worked, the post-war socialist lost the argument, and thus their precious dream of state-owned Britain was dead, kept alive only by the machinations of the European Union.

So when people say that Jeremy Corbyn’s economic policies would take us back to the 1970’s, that’s because his socialist ideas, or rather some of them, had already been tried before, with disastrous consequences. If we elect Corbyn, he will most likely take us back to the days of Old Labour, and leave office after we’ve accumulated more debt than we could possibly imagine. Given what we know of his economic policies, I find it baffling that there’s still a third of the population that actually wants to vote Labour on Thursday’s election, also keeping in mind that if we vote Labour, not only will we get Corbyn and his functionally retarded economic policies, but we’ll also elect his cabinet of assorted Marxists and socialists, all of whom are demonstrably incompetent ideologues.

I think over the past few days I’ve made my case, and I this will be the last time before the election in which I write about Labour. Even though I might not vote for the Tories, I still hope that the Tories can still win in a landslide, or at least attain a large enough majority that Labour ends up with less than 200 MP’s, triggering a leadership contest within the Labour Party in which Corbyn is either kicked out of the party, or stays on, forcing the moderates who can’t stand Corbyn to split off and form their own party. It would be the death of Labour, and given what they’ve done in the past, I’d be glad to see them go.

In this third part of my series on why you shouldn’t vote for the Labour Party this Thursday, I will talk about Labour’s position on the most important issue of the election – Brexit. The Labour manifesto states that the party “accepts the result of the referendum” and wants to maintain a close relationship with Europe. One thing that Corbyn has made crystal clear on numerous occasions is that he has ruled out a “no deal” option at the end of Article 50 negotiations. What that basically means is that, for him, even if the EU gave him the worst deal you can possibly imagine, he would rather take that than end the negotiations with no deal.

He also wants to “retain the benefits of the single market and the customs union”, blissfully unaware that to be in the single market means us complying with the EU’s laws, and still being under the jurisdiction of the EU courts. He also wants to scrap the Great Repeal Bill, which would repeal the 1972 European Communities Act and hand lawmaking powers back to MP’s, and replace it with an EU Rights and Protections Bill. Of course he doesn’t seem to care that the fact that we couldn’t make our own laws one of the biggest reasons we voted to leave the EU in the first place.

I mentioned before that Corbyn was a moral coward because of his refusal to deal with the issue of nuclear weapons, but his stance on the EU confirms such cowardice. Think about it for a moment – you have a Labour leader who, in contrast to the bloody difficult woman we have as Prime Minister, is soft on the EU. He would mostly cave to the EU leaders’ demands if he thought it was convenient for him. If the EU demanded that we take in more immigrants to fit Merkel’s migrant quotas, I am throughly convinced that Corbyn would do exactly that. As for that £100 billion divorce bill, Mr. Corbyn would probably pay up, as if he hadn’t already gutted the taxpayer’s purse enough already.

He and his supporters have claimed that Theresa May’s approach to the Brexit negations is “reckless”, and they say this primarily because she is pursuing the hard Brexit route, which is what the people actually want. The truth is we don’t have to give the EU anything. In fact, it is the EU that has to appease us, or else they will face the consequences of alienating Britain. As long as Theresa May remains as Prime Minister, we have the upper hand, and she knows it. It also helps that Theresa May is confident in her role as Prime Minister, backed by undivided party loyalty. Corbyn, meanwhile, is not. He acts on his feelings rather than logic, most of his party hates him and would happily see him go, and he’s so gullible that the EU could easily take advantage of him. I would not be surprised if the EU leaders would celebrate a Labour victory.

And that’s just if we even have Brexit at all. I’ve been hearing talk of how a progressive coalition with Labour and other left-wing parties might actually happen. This would require a hung parliament to happen, in which case Labour may have to form a coalition with any left-wing party that’s willing. If in the unlikely event that such a progressive alliance would succeed, then they will try and stop the Brexit process however they can, and if they succeed, then that’s it. Our last hope for sovereignty would be all but dashed.

So, as I’ve said many times before, if you want Brexit to happen, then you cannot allow Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister. He would bring utter ruination to the dream of taking back our national sovereignty, and our right to self-determination, but he’d also do far worse. He’d unwittingly kill off any faith the people have in trying to better their situation through democratic, peaceful means, and that’s when the more far-right nationalists would come in, and usher in something far worse. In the fourth and final part of this series, I aim to debunk the idea that Labour want to change things for the better, using what happened the last time we tried nationalisation as an example.

When Theresa May first called the election, it seemed as if she was unbeatable. You have the Prime Minister willing to carry out a hard Brexit as the people demanded, leading the Conservative Party against an openly Marxist Labour Party that is increasingly out of touch with the working class. Early polls showed the Conservatives with a 20-point lead over the failing Labour Party. Experts estimated that the Labour party would be left with only 180 seats, and that’s just being generous. But ever since the Tory manifesto launched, the Tories have been sliding further down the polls, with Labour rising and the Tories’ lead being slashed. Now there’s talk of the possibility of another hung parliament, or worse, Jeremy Corbyn taking power.

My question to Theresa May is this – how could she fuck it up? She had a spotless election that the Tories were guaranteed to win as long as they stuck to Brexit as the main issue. She could do absolutely nothing and still win. Then she called to repeal the ban on fox hunting, which most people in the country still want banned. And then there’s the dementia tax fiasco, which saw her u-turn as soon as things looked ugly for her. And then she released her manifesto, which showcased just how vampiric the one-nation Tories could be, and capped it all off by confirming that Theresa May is coming after the internet. In fact, I’m surprised I didn’t comment earlier.

Up until then I was with Tories. I was even willing to look past some of their left-lurching economic policies in the name of securing Brexit. Now I question whether or not I can even bring myself to vote Tory because it would mean endorsing her platform of internet censorship. She’s alienating young people like myself, and she doesn’t seem to care. It’s almost as if she wants to screw up the election so that she doesn’t have to deliver Brexit, and so this is an opportunity to walk away from her responsibilities as Prime Minister. As for my voting intentions, I’m mulling over either voting UKIP (because I think their policies actually make sense), or spoiling my ballot in protest, signing the Libertarian Party instead. Those are the only two honest options I can think of.

What really baffles me is the idea that Labour is actually rising in the polls. Are the Tories so bad that people are willing to vote for communists instead? Is the government so incapable of running an election campaign that it could lose to complete and total moron? Is this the state of British politics as we know it? I would have thought that Corbyn’s weakness on defence and foreign policy would have hindered his rise, but it seems that Theresa May’s ineptitude on social care, and the many other errors in her manifesto, have helped Labour. As the old saying goes – oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them.

Although I might not vote Tory anymore, I still hope that the Conservative Party manages to win the election, because as I have said before, Theresa May has demonstrated that she is the only candidate capable of delivering Brexit properly. I would trust Paul Nuttall to do the same if UKIP were actually electable. As frustrated as I am with the Tories, I still believe they can win this election.

For starters, the media abhors a vacuum, and election campaigns are famously dull, with this election being the dullest of them all. The media hungers for a big buzz, and what better shock for the readers than the idea of an open Marxist being elected to the position of Prime Minister. Second, I think the idea that Corbyn may actually win the election would spur most or all of the right-wingers into voting Conservative en masse just to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of power. In fact, that may very well be the reason why it will be impossible for UKIP to gain a seat. I also believe that the elderly voters will hand the Tories a victory. After all, they lived through the time when Corbyn’s brand of socialism was actually in effect, and would vote Conservative to ensure that their grandchildren don’t have to go through what they did in the 1970’s.

Lastly, I think the polls are being skewed again. What we’re seeing with Labour’s rise in the polls is exactly the same as what was happening with the EU referendum. Thanks to the social stigma surrounding the Leave vote, many people, when asked by pollsters about their voting intentions, lied to them about voting Remain in order to not look like the “undesirables” of British society. When Britain went to the ballot box, however, nobody could judge them for how they would vote, and 52% of people who turned out voted to Leave. I think the same thing will happen here. After the Tory manifesto was released, more people started telling the polls they wanted to vote Labour in order to look good, and when it’s time to vote, most people will inevitably vote Tory. Given the alternative, I can only hope that is to be the case.

A lot of people, including myself, were panicking when the press started reporting of the Tories’ fall in the polls, and we had every right to. However, I am confident that, despite how frustrating the Tory campaign has been, the Tories will still win. Perhaps they’ll do better than we thought they would, and return a three-figure majority not seen since the days of Tony Blair. Of course I’m being an idealist, but I don’t have to be one to assume that the Tories can still defeat Labour, and stop the return of 70’s-style socialism.